> With extractpdfmark
> ===================
>
> PS backend:
>
> 4,8M Documentation/out-www/en/notation.pdf
FYI: Using a recent GS version with its new PDF backend, the size gets
larger than 20MByte. I guess this is a bug, and I will soon report
this to the GS people so that it gets fixed in the next GS version (in
March), which will eventually drop the old PDF engine completely.
On the other hand, GS's new PDF engine no longer contains a PS
interpreter; it is possible that `extractpdfmark` doesn't work
anymore, and we have to find something new...
> I'm not sure what exactly yields the smaller size of PS backend +
> extractpdfmark or how we could get it in Cairo.
The idea is that you compile all snippets with references to fonts
only but not with actual fonts. This allows Ghostscript to analyze
and squeeze the fonts of all included PDFs globally; as an example,
the NR then has only a few dozen (subsetted) fonts instead of about
4500.
`extractpdfmark` works around another 'feature' of GS.[*] From
extractpdfmark's `README.md` file:
[...] when Ghostscript reads the main PDF produced by the TeX system
and outputs the final PDF it does not preserve PDF page-mode and
named-destinations etc. As a result, when you open the final PDF,
it is not displayed correctly. Also, remote PDF links will not work
correctly. [...]
This program is able to extract page mode and named destinations as
PDFmark from PDF. By using this you can get the small PDF files
that have preserved them.
Werner
[*] Probably driven by customer demands, the GS people removed a lot
of PDF manipulation possibilities over the last years,
concentrating rather on creating PDFs that are good for printing.
Using a new PDF engine is another step into this direction; this
time, controlling Ghostscript via PostScript features gets lost.
